Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday that he’s planning to introduce legislation next week to provide additional financial support to Israel, arguing a new agreement with the United States doesn’t go far enough….

The U.S. and Israel this week formally finalized a security agreement that includes $38 billion for the Middle Eastern ally over the next decade….

But Graham added that Israeli officials told him they wanted more money but “just felt like they couldn’t go beyond what the MOU said.”

The North Koreans are not dumb. They know that regime change has been a core element of the U.S. national-security establishment since its inception in the 1940s. They saw the U.S. regime change operation in Iraq. They’re familiar with the CIA’s regime change operation in Iran in 1953… They are fully aware of the fact that insofar as North Korea and Cuba (and Russia) are concerned, the Cold War has never ended for the U.S. national-security establishment. They know that U.S. national-security state officials have never given up their Cold War hope of achieving regime change in North Korea and Cuba (and Russia).

So, what’s the only thing that would keep the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking and invading North Korea? Nuclear weapons!

Today, U.S. military engagement in the Middle East looks increasingly permanent. Despite the White House having formally ended the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in both countries. The U.S. is dropping bombs on Iraq and Syria faster than it can make them, and according to the Pentagon, its bombing campaign in Libya has “no end point at this particular moment.” The U.S. is also helping Saudi Arabia wage war in Yemen, in addition to conducting occasional airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia….

Despite the lack of progress, the last 15 years of war have come at a horrific cost.

Emails just released by the State Department appear to show Clinton Foundation officials brokering a meeting between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a top military leader of Bahrain – a Middle Eastern country that is a major foundation donor. Soon after the correspondence about a meeting, Clinton’s State Department significantly increased arms export authorizations to the country’s autocratic government, even as that nation moved to crush pro-democracy protests.

I don’t want to remind them they were sadly wrong, but they were. So write this off however you prefer, but understand that we were lied to again to drag us again into an open-ended war in Iraq-Syria. Last time it was Bush and those missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. This time is was Obama and saving the Yazidi people from genocide.

Although the U.S. government would not dare to formally renounce the Geneva Conventions, the normalization of deviance has effectively replaced them with elastic standards of behavior and accountability whose main purpose is to shield senior U.S. military officers and civilian officials from accountability for war crimes.

This week Bernie Sanders started moonlighting as a traveling used car salesman. A month ago, the neophyte salesman volunteered to handle the problematic Clinton account, featuring the Hillary model, which, like the Edsel of old, had previously gone unsold during its initial rollout in 2008.

Suppose some federal agency was conducting tours in which they regularly guided people to walk through a bed of rattlesnakes. Every day, some people are bit by rattlesnakes and die. Imagine American churches, seeing this ongoing death toll, exhorted their parishioners every Sunday (1) to pray that people stop being bitten by rattlesnakes; and (2) to also pray for the bureaucrats who are guiding people through the rattlesnake beds.

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up….

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.

The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension….

DFAS also could not make accurate year-end Army financial statements because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system.